Samsung enjoys £2.9bn profit, less than half of Apple's

Samsung publically enjoyed riding its current wave of success as it highlighted monster profits of £2.9bn in the fourth quarter of 2011 during its annual earnings call. That's a Scrooge McDuck-scale pool of cash to be sure, but it's a puddle compared to the ocean of moolah Apple is wallowing in.

The Korean electronics giant achieved £26.7bn in total sales across its whole business over the last three months, of which £2.9bn was clear profit. We're not sure how much of that cash will be spent on a party, but we'd hope it's most of it.

It's been a rosy year for Samsung, with it proudly announcing 300 million phone sales in 2011. Unsurprisingly, most of those sales were attributed to the Galaxy S2, but sales of the Note, the Nexus and the currently non-existent Galaxy S3 are sure to boost these numbers handsomely in 2012.

Samsung's phones made up around 45 per cent of its total earnings, with its semiconductor sector also making some healthy wonga and its display sector -- particularly its glorious TVs -- reportedly generating £3.5bn in sales.

Impressive stuff, sure, but the shine is rubbed off a little when you bear in mind Apple's monster figures, including a record profit of £8.3bn. Much of that profit came from the sale of the iPhone 4S, of which 37 million were sold in the last 14 weeks of 2011 alone.

Considering Apple has one phone against Samsung's galaxy of, er, Galaxies, we can't help but tip our hat to Apple on this one. In fact, the iPhone outsold all Android phones put together in America, although it lags here in Europe.

Still, Samsung is infinitely healthier than Nokia, which posted a total loss of £800m at the end of 2011. It reckons the Windows Phone Lumia 800 didn't launch in time to prevent this loss, so will certainly be hoping for more positive figures in 2012, with the Lumia 800, the cheaper Lumia 710 and the upcoming high-end Lumia 900.

There's everything to play for this year and with Mobile World Congress just around the corner, we're really excited to see what the figures look like later in the year. In the meantime, drop us your market analysis in the comments below, or over on our impecunious Facebook page.